Venezuelan prez Hugo Chavez today postponed a scheme to secure his place in the pantheon of classic comedy Latin American despots by shifting back his country's clocks half an hour, Reuters reports.
Chavez rather gamely admitted that his cunning plan, slated for activation today and which "would allow children to wake up for …

Just goes to show

That any man with determination no matter how humble his beginnings can grow up to be a mad south american dictator. You can tell he's a modern one though no mustache. Interesting how no matter what people try in those countries they always end up with a more less stark raving loony either a facist(the US funds these) a commie(cuba funds these) or a thief(homegrown).

Daylight Savings/Summer Time is AWFUL

On November 2, my daughter will be able to watch the sunrise from her kindergarten classroom four minutes AFTER classes have started for the day because of the new Daylight Time rules instituted by Bush and his buddies.

Screw you George Bush for torturing children by making them be in school BEFORE SUNRISE instead of coming up with a REAL ENERGY SOLUTION.

Never forget that shifting the clock forward was an invention of Josef Stalin, someone whose boots you would dearly love to lick.

Dubya too?

I'm really surprised the Dubya didn't come up with this brilliant scheme for the US. In a stroke he'd have wrecked most of the world's computer systems. However he likes to be seen as a leader, so following Venezuela will be beneath his dignity.

Bananas!

"All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check. Furthermore, all children under sixteen years old - are now sixteen years old."

@ Dan Beshear

A wise and just leader..

the heroic and forward-thinking Comrade Chavez continues to challenge Western imperialist hegemony, this time by taking the Peoples' Republic out of the neo-colonialist time zone imposed by American fascists and counter-revolutionaries in a further attempt to deny the full expression of the Socialist ideal. Long live Comrade Chavez! Forward the Revolucion!

(I'm turning my Soviet-era Sekonda back right now in a show of solidarity with the progressive forces of the International Socialist Front. It's a lot of watch for little money, as Comrade R.W. Barker told me in 1978.)

besides, Dubya can't tell the time until Mickey's hands are both pointing up.

RE: Dan Beshear

Actually, the modern form of of DST was originally devised by an Englishman, one William Willet, in 1905, and was first widely taken up by the Germans and their allies and occupied lands in 1916. The Russians didn't make use of it until a year after (before Lenin threw hi sstrop) and after it had been accepted across Europe, and the States was looking at it in 1918 before Stalin had come to power.

I suggest you try reading some real books instead of just accepting anything spoon-fed to you with the "Bush-is-the-root-of-all-evil" mantra. If not, then I suppose you haven't heard that Bushitler has personally poisoned all dollar bills with a Dummicrat-detecting nano-chip paste and you really need to send me all your money for your own safety.... honest!

Because he can

Behaviour like this isn't the sign of anyone crazy. Arguablely it is the sign of someone very smart. He does it because he can. Stirring up silly little things like this is a great way to remind the populace who calls the shots.

From the technical/IT side of things it is trivial in the extreme. Any useful operating system takes this in its stride, they all use Olson's zoneinfo code, measure time internally in UTC, and can cope with any time-zone offset, including those counties that are on arbitrary offsets from UTC. And it copes with arbitrary changes in daylight saving and time offsets in its stride. Of course there is one OS that is so inward looking that it fails to cope with such trivial things, but no-one technically literate uses it anyway.

As noted there are a number of other areas of the world that live on half hour boundaries. I live in another. It is a pain somethings, mostly because pretty well any watch you can buy has a really easy jump hour adjust capability, but changing a half hour means you have to drive the minute hand about. So travel means you have to spend an extra 30 seconds messing with your watch. Other than that I don't think I have ever noticed.

Up until nations were linked internally by railways each town would typically set its time to the appropriate time as befitted their longitude. The UK set the pace, most railways had standardised on the one national time by 1847. In 1880 the legal system followed suit. Of course since it also defined GMT, the UK was by definition on an integral multiple of an hour offset. Where the multiplier was zero.

Re: Dan Beshear

Would your kids rather sit in a classroom while the sun isn't out or play out back in the yard in the dark? I think many people prefer to have light when they get home from school and work vs. having light when they get up.

Forwards / Backwards

RE: Dictator, Despot???

"Wasn't he elected by the people of Venezuela? Isn't he quite popular in Venezuela. I know some quarters would like us to think he's a despot and a dictator but c'mon."

Seconded.

Although he has powers to rule by decree for the next year or so, these were grated by the National Assembly. Against the back drop of 3 consecutive election victories, retaining his post in an opposition enforced referendum and coup attempt by the military, 'despot' is somewhat wide of the mark.

But then, it's easier to tag along with the current US administration's view of the world than bother with something as dull as accuracy.

@Mark Malley

Sorry but I personally find being forced to get up in the dark is barbaric. I also strongly believe that having everyones schedules forcibly changed twice a year is also barbaric (Ones body clock can't be reset overnight!). Just set the damned clocks to half an hour in between BST and GMT and leave it there - after all in the UK the benefit of the altered time only lasts a few short weeks due to the magnitude of variation in the length of daylight hours between seasons.

@re re re re Ban Beshear...

Oh, hands up how many of you follow-on respondents consulted Wikipedia?

DST

DST sucks in zones where sunlight barely changes. Venezuela is right inside the tropical zone, very close to the equator, so I thought this article was about trashing DST. Which I would definitely support.

I live in Mexico City, so DST means I have to go to work in the dark when I get the early-bird shift. Most people are against DST, as a good part of the country is inside the "tropical zone", thus having no significant sunlight changes. And with Mexico City commuter times, that means you will be doing lots of things in the dark, waking up at 5am; defeating DST purposes.

The only reason DST was established in 1995 was to sync clocks with the US for merely economic reasons. Any other arguments are pure bollocks.

Standard weights and measures...

For God's sake can't we drop this DST bollucks? By an estimate Bush cited himself, the new change will only save the US two million barrels of oil per year, which is a metaphorical drop in the bucket compared to reprogramming all the computers, missed work hours, scheduling hassles etc.

The Big Con

Daylight Saving Time is a massive con anyway. It doesn't really save anything. The mass confusion it causes almost certainly outweighs any benefit it may once have had.

In Summer, we get more daylight. That is a fact. It's evenly split about a point called "local solar midday". Along the Greenwich Meridian, solar midday always occurs around 12:00 UTC; it shifts by four minutes for each degree of longitude. At mid-spring, 21 March, and mid-autumn, 21 September, we get exactly 12 hours of daylight from 06:00 UTC to 18:00 UTC. At midwinter, 21 December, the UK gets only 8 hours of daylight from 08:00 until 16:00 UTC; but at midsummer, we receive 16 hours, from 04:00 until 20:00 UTC.

It so happens that the "standard" working day of 09:00 to 17:00 is centred an hour *after* midday. This gives time to get washed and dressed for work by daylight, even in the very depths of Winter. However, it also means that in the height of Summer, some of the daylight hours occur while people are still sleeping: getting up sooner would give a longer continuous period of daylight.

What would surely have been logical, would have been to alter the working day. Have businesses work from 09:00 to 17:00 in the Winter and from 08:00 to 16:00 or 07:00 to 15:00 in the Summer. And twice a year, for a few weeks, there would even be just a bit less traffic on the roads due to different businesses switching on different dates.

Instead, we forced everyone to pretend it was 13:00 when it was really midday -- and we continue to do so, despite the fact that most modern workplaces are not dependent upon natural daylight.

DST and DORA

If I remember from GCSE history..Defence of the Realm Act 1914 introduced DST to the UK. So people could work longer producing munitions. Pub opening times were also changed so they were not drunk at work ... something we are only recently correcting.

Countries align for economic reasons

Time zones are not set in stone. When where I lived in Indiana we never did daylight savings. From the windows time settings.

GMT+03:30 Tehran

GMT+04:30 Kabul

GMT+05:30 Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Sri Jayawrdenepura

GMT+05:45 Kathmandu

GMT+06:30 Yangon (Rangoon)

GMT+09:30 Adelaide, Darwin

GMT-03:30 Newfoundland

Countries do alignments to make time relative within their country . If a time zone splits a country they can shift their time a half hour and have the entire country in the same time zone. Shifting an entire country like Venezuela is planning on doing can greatly benefit a country.

Does the "Doomsday Clock" follow DST?

Chavez root of all evil?

Of course this will be the man that is throwing (thrown?) out the US water companies because they hiked up the prices so high, most people couldn't afford clean running water and basic sanitation. Nationalised the Oil industry because nearly all the money from their resources went overseas.

Mmm sounds like an evil dictator to me, he should follow in the good morale standards of the Saudi's and be liked by everyone in the west.

Stupid anti DSTers & stupid anti-Chavezers

Honestly - what is it with these people?

If you want to criticise a despotic regime, criticise Saudi Arabia - country that gave you 9/11, where women are not permitted to possess a driving licence and where mere possession of a crucifix renders one liable to indefinite detention and torture.

...but the Saudi despots are Bush's buddies......

What's Venezuela ever done to anybody? Given some oil to Cuba?

Given a bit of money to a few neighbouring countries to save them from having to have dealings with the World Bank?

Big deal.

As for DST - your "body clock" has nothing to do with the real clock - and in summer, your "body clock" moves itself back due to the increase in daylight hours. Adjusting the real clock is just to bring things into line a bit better.

If you don't like what the clock says - just ignore it - do things when your "body clock" tells you to do them.

Personally, I sleep until 7 in winter, but wake up at 5 in summer, so if I did things according to the real clock I would be wasting my time something chronic - DST or no DST.

Something anti-DSTers all seem to have in common is utter stupidity - we get it a lot here in Australia from those who live in hotter parts of the country - like the American South, the Australian North is populated by utter morons - I think heat saps intelligence.

barbarism

If you think all this DST stuff is barbarism, you should try traveling beyond your 15-longitudinal-degree sliver of the earth.. the effect on one's precious bodily clock is a disgrace beyond reproach -- absolutely unbecoming of European civility! Please encourage your MEP to support legislation to re-form all national boundaries strictly along meridians evenly divisible by 7.5.